May 25, 2011

Wednesday Linkspam

This is something that’s come up over the past few days that I really think needs to be explained. I’m going to do my best to define it, but there’s very little scholarly material on it that I’ve read (if anyone has any worthy articles on the topic, I’d love to read them!), so this is just from what I understand sexual privilege to be.

[Sexual privilege] is not, not, notstraight privilege. Neither does it denystraight privilege. They’re not mutually exclusive, they intersect. Patriarchal society revolves around heterosexual, romantic, male-dominated pair-bonding and enforces a binary conception of gender and sexuality. Thus, along the gender-sexuality metric, society grants certain privileges to people who are male, who are straight, who are romantic, who are monogamous, who fit neatly within the male/female or gay/straight binary, who are cisgendered, so on and so forth.

This post began life as a discussion of the ‘I’m-more-oppressed-than-you’ game. There’s been a spate of posts on various sites recently discussing whether asexuals have a ‘claim’ to the queer community, and one argument is that we aren’t oppressed in the same way. Rather than argue this out, I’d much rather share with you my experiences of one particular kind of oppression, one I’m sure many of you are familiar with – erasure.

How can I convince the people who don’t believe me that this is a big deal when all I have is myself? And I don’t just mean the people on the internet whom I can ignore if I want to, I mean my parents.

Sure! The vast majority of people are parents, or want to be parents… and almost everyone is sexual. That is not proof that YOU, specifically, won’t change your mind. Other people’s life decisions are not evidence for the validity of yours.

In this case, she needs to get in touch with people who are willing to share their stories. Names are not needed and anonymity will be protected. While numerous studies on suicide rates among LGBT people are common, no one has thought to study the suicide rates among Asexuals of any age.

So there is a fic I am making vague stabs at trying to write. It is not going very well. This is in part because I lack some crucial information! Namely, what is it like to experience sexual attraction?

I’ve started a post that’s kind of tangential to the sexual privilege checklist project, where I’m hoping we can talk about some of the negative effects of being ace that generally aren’t talked about. Since I’m hoping to get a discussion going, could you please stick it in your next linkspam? It’s here. Thanks.